About the Author

Professor David Bellamy

OBE., BSc., PhD., Hon; FLS,. DSC., DUniv., C.Biol., FIBiol., FRIN.
Hon: Professor Adult and Continuing Education-University of Durham. Special Professor of Geography University of Nottingham. Hon Professor of the University of Central Queensland.
President of The Conservation Foundation, Durham. Surrey and Birmingham Wildlife Trusts, Coral Cay Conservation, National Association for Environmental Education. British Naturalists Association, Conservation Volunteers of Ireland, British Institute of Cleaning Science, British Home and Holiday Parks Association, Camping and Caravanning Club Of Great Britain.
Vice President British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, Fauna and Flora International, Marine Conservation Society, Australian Marine Conservation Society, Wild Trout Trust, Countrywide Holidays Association.
Trustee of the Living Landscape Trust, Hon Fellow Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management. Honorary Member of the Emirates Environment Group.
International consultant, Author of 44 books, Writer and presenter of some 400 television programmes on Botany, Ecology and Environment.
Recipient of The Dutch Order of the Golden Ark, the U.N.E.P. Global 500 Award; The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for Underwater Research;
BAFTA., Richard Dimbleby Award., BSAC Diver of The Year Award, RGS Busk Medal
Founder Chair of the International committee for the Tourism for Tomorrow Awards. 1995- 93.
Originator along with David Shreeve of The Conservation Foundation and the Ford European Conservation Awards.

Greetings from up over 2008!

A happy and a prosperous new year based, one hopes, on the commonsense of resource efficiency not sleazy carbon trading.

Just take a look around the world: everything is growing, from housing, shopping centres, highways, airport expansion, hotels, sports stadia and of course grid-lock.

Little wonder then, that after all their carbon heavy pre-Christmas shopping in Bali, the global warmers needed a final late night session cobbling together a statement that in effect awarded them another 2 years on full pay with expenses to plan a road map to their next talk-fest in Poznan.

This Bali Bash brought me a rash of enquiries about why I was still a global warming sceptic when the world knows that:

1. Carbon Dioxide is the main green house gas.

2. Records show that global temperature is closely linked to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

3. Over the past 100 years the amount of carbon dioxide has increased and the global temperature is also increasing.

4. Reducing the amount of insulating gases we put into the atmosphere is key to reducing the impacts of climate change.

All I have to do is point out the following convenient truths:

1. Water vapour is the main greenhouse gas providing 97% of the greenhouse effect without which there would be little or no life on earth. Even the IPCC owns up to the fact that of the 200 billion tonnes of CO2- carbon circulated every year, less than 8 billion comes from human causes thus only 3% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is due to human activities.

2. As you celebrate the dubious success of the Bali Bash please take notice of the carbon dioxide in your champagne, when cold it bucks the fizz – when warm, out comes the CO2 into the atmosphere.

This is exactly what happens when the oceans warm up. Records in multiple ice cores, stomata, ocean sediments and other research reported in peer-reviewed journals back this up.

Why do the warmers continue to ignore this evidence?

Whether you like it or not the link between CO2 and warmth is the opposite of all that the global warmers claim, which is that increased temperature is caused by the rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The historical record shows temperatures go up, followed by the rise in carbon dioxide concentration. So how can carbon dioxide be to blame? And what, we ask, caused these repeated reversals in any case?

3. The claim that CO2 has increased in the last 100 years is only true if we ignore 90,000 CO2 measurements taken by Nobel Award winning scientists. These show that levels of CO2 in the recent past were much higher than the IPCC are willing to admit. Add to that global temperatures fell from 1940 through the early seventies causing some of the now global warmers to scaremonger that we were heading for a catastrophic ice age. Throughout that time the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was rising.

4. “The global temperature record has not been exceeded since 1998.” Although the doomsters screamed that this high was proof of global warming they now claim that 1998 was anomalous due to a strong El Nino. Of course they never tell Joe public that El Nino is not a source of heat it can only redistribute what is there already.

I could go on and on; however a recent court case in Britain found that Al Gore’s, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ should not be shown to school children without warning them that his “shockumentary” contained many errors and cherry picked its science.

It is a shocking indictment of science as it is now presented by the media, (including some of the worlds leading national broadcast channels, like the ABC and the BBC) that pupils are forced to base their future hopes and fears on what are no more than a pack of computer driven scenarios. There is no scientific evidence that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will cause all the catastrophes they talk about.

Even worse for in a recent survey 41% of children questioned said they were losing sleep due to the man-made global warming scare. Is that acceptable given the entire scare is based solely on politically funded computer models which can be programmed to suggest whatever politicians require?

Mind you those same politicians are so worried that the truth will out that they are doing everything in their power and a lot that isn’t, to erode the roots and the routes of democracy before their term of office comes to an end.

My last two points.

Many genuine climate scientists who do their best to enlighten the world that our climate is governed by solar variation and orbital changes – the well known Milankovitch Cycles – are vilified as “deniers” and “flat-earthists”. This is surely the conduct of gutter politics not scientific debate.

These include the Russian Academy of Science who tell us they expect a mini ice age to begin in 2012 and as I put computer to paper the first sun spots have appeared heralding what promises to be a weak 24th sun spot cycle. We await its impact with interest.

New Zealander’s in the light of this information are you still sitting comfortably in your second real cool summer on the trot, while 16.2 million squared kilometres of sea ice has set a new Antarctic record, a new absolute record high since the measurements started in 1979?

I also hope that your farmers, foresters and gardeners are benefiting from the “free lunch” fertiliser application that has been working its wonders across the world. It falls from the sky and is called carbon dioxide – a real cool gas!